Cut to the Bone

by Ellison Cooper

  He left it vague and hung back. Sayer appreciated him giving her some space to form her own opinions.

  She was drawn toward the statue. The twelve-foot sculpture of Einstein reclined on a curved bench of white stone, holding a book inscribed with three of the physicist’s famous equations.

  “‘Joy and amazement of the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can just form a faint notion,’” Sayer murmured her favorite Einstein quote like a talisman as she approached the memorial.

  The bronze figure looked down on a circular star map spread out before him. Almost thirty feet across, thousands of metal studs representing the planets, sun, moon, and stars sparkled on the expanse of lustrous granite.

  At the center of the celestial map, a heart-shatteringly small young woman lay on her back. The body was perfect, untouched other than a smear of blood across her lips.

  During her career, Sayer had seen plenty of dead bodies and she was good at distancing herself from the horrors of death, but this display turned her stomach. Murder is usually violent, messy, so the purposeful perfection of the girl’s body felt wrong on a deeply instinctual level. Despite Sayer’s roiling stomach, she didn’t look away from the confusing scene.

  A large axe was placed in the girl’s right hand. Along the white granite bench, the words “as above, so below” were painted in blood.

  But the most unusual things at the scene were the nine carved figurines, each no more than a foot tall, crouched in a circle around the body. Sayer stepped closer to get a better look. The small statues had sharp teeth protruding beneath short animal snouts. Their primate bodies hunched forward, humanlike, hands resting on their knees.

  Nine baboons encircled the girl like an audience observing her in death.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN MEMORIAL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Sayer stood at the edge of the star map, taking it all in. She was frustrated by the fact that Director Anderson clearly didn’t intend to assign her a partner for this case. He knew this was going to be one of those cases that had no good outcome. Even if she caught the killer tonight, a cop and a girl were dead in a way that would draw endless media speculation.

  And Anderson clearly wanted Sayer to bear the brunt of that scrutiny by herself.

  The Bureau was still recovering from the recent scandal that resulted in the forced departure of Assistant Director Holt, one of Sayer’s mentors at the FBI. Director Anderson had pushed for both Holt and Sayer to be fired, though she still didn’t fully understand why. With political maneuvering and adept media manipulation, he’d managed to get rid of Holt. Sayer had held on to her job by the skin of her teeth.

  Maybe this was his next attempt to paint her as incompetent, setting her up to take on a difficult-to-solve, high-profile murder.

  “None of that political bullshit matters now,” Sayer said to herself as she pulled her thick curls up into a wrap and put paper booties over her heavy boots. When the photographer finished getting the aerial shots, she carefully stepped over the carved baboons to reach the dead girl.

  Detective Wyatt stayed back, watching Sayer work.

  “Her wrists look like they were bound,” she noted as she pulled on gloves and gently pressed the girl’s fingers into the mobile scanner.

  After she scanned the fingerprints, Sayer gestured to the sidewalk. “How could no one notice this? We’re right across from the Mall, not exactly off the beaten path. He took one hell of a risk.”

  They were less than twenty feet from Constitution Avenue, one of the central thoroughfares of Washington, D.C. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was just across the street, one of the most popular destinations on the National Mall.

  “Maybe the unsub doesn’t care if he gets caught,” Detective Wyatt said.

  Sayer nodded. She was already building an image of the unknown subject—the unsub. She needed to know what she was up against and the thought of a fearless killer sharpened her hunter’s instinct.

  “That looks like a purposeful smear of blood on her mouth.” The detective pointed to the cupid’s heart of blood at the center of the girl’s lips.

  Sayer just nodded again, still processing the scene in her mind. She stepped back outside the ring of baboons and went over to the writing on the bench.

  “‘As above, so below,’” she read out loud. The words appeared to be written in blood and were already drying into a deep rust color. She searched for the terms on her phone and got hundreds of hits. Too much to sort through out here in the cold.

  Sayer stepped even farther back to observe the scene as a whole while the Evidence Response Team and medical examiner continued their painstaking job of gathering the smallest trace evidence that might lead to the unsub.

  She let her mind free-associate, listing all the bizarre elements of the scene. Baboon figurines. An axe. Words written in blood. Why here at the foot of the Einstein statue? Was the physicist important to the killer? Or maybe the National Academy of Sciences? Clearly these were ritualistic elements, but what did they mean? She tried to think of any religion that might involve axes and baboons, but couldn’t think of anything. Even Satanism didn’t fit.

  With no answers evident, she watched the FBI teams expertly processing the scene, doing their jobs with calm efficiency. Sayer muttered, “Come on,” under her breath, willing her team to find something to help her catch the monster who did this.

  ROAD TO FBI HEADQUARTERS, QUANTICO, VA

  Almost an hour later, the sky was still clear as Sayer rode toward the FBI Headquarters at Quantico. The frigid air cut through the edges of her riding jacket. Patches of black ice turned the highway into a deadly obstacle course, forcing her to drive half the speed limit.

  She was shivering by the time she parked her Silver Hawk in the almost empty parking lot. Hoping to knock some of the chill from her bones, Sayer stomped her way into the building and, out of habit, hurried up to Assistant Director Holt’s office. The office was dark and empty. She had momentarily forgotten that the assistant director was gone.

  Unsure if she should check in with Director Anderson, she decided to hold off until after the task force meeting.

  Surely the director of the FBI doesn’t need an update every hour, Sayer thought as she headed down to her office.

  Ezra waited at her desk, thermos in hand. With bright blue hair and half a dozen piercings, he looked more like a D.C. hipster than an FBI data analyst. Bright neon blue zebra stripes decorated his prosthetic legs, matching his hair.

  Sayer gratefully accepted the thermos of scalding coffee. “I owe you my firstborn.”

  Ezra snorted.

  “So where are we?” she asked.

  “I’ve got the task force together and they’re assembling now. The bodies are on the way here and they should get started on the autopsy of the girl soon. I’ve got two analysts on the blood writing and weird shit left at the scene. We’ve requested a profile, but I haven’t heard back from the Behavioral Analysis folks.” His blue hair flopped forward and he blew it up out of his eyes.

  “Any ID on the girl yet?”

  “Not yet. I ran her prints with no luck. We’re working on DNA. Should have results soon. I’ve got background on the dump site and some photos cued up to show the task force whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thanks, Ezra. Let’s call the task force meeting at”—Sayer looked at the time—“one o’clock. That gives me twenty minutes to look over everything before we start.”

  “As you wish.” Ezra doffed an invisible hat. His prosthetics clacked metal-on-metal as he pulled himself up with his cane. Still relatively new to walking with the double prostheses, Ezra moved with jerky but confident steps down the hall.

  Sayer looked down at her empty desk and realized there was nothing new for her to review. Her phone rang and she answered the unknown caller, hoping for a lead.

  Instead, she recognized Subject 037’s low voice.

  “Hello, Sayer.”

  “What is it?” she said sharply, not in any mood to engage in t
he kind of banter he would want.

  “My, my, testy. I was only calling to wish you luck on your new case…”

  Sayer took a deep breath. She was actually considering asking for funding to do an in-depth case study of 037. He was dangerous but fascinating and she didn’t want to destroy her ability to study him further by telling him to fuck off.

  “I’m about to step into a meeting,” she managed to say.

  “Of course. I’ve been keeping tabs on you and just heard that you’ve been assigned the dreadful murders downtown. So tragic.” His voice dripped with sympathy that Sayer knew was completely manufactured. As a full-fledged psychopath, 037 didn’t experience normal human emotions.

  Sayer almost asked him what he meant when he said he was keeping tabs on her, but decided she didn’t really want to know right now. Not for the first time, she considered tracing his calls. With her resources at the FBI, it wouldn’t be difficult to find out his true identity. But when he agreed to be part of her research on noncriminal psychopaths, they had both signed an agreement that guaranteed his anonymity. It would be a huge ethics breach to break that agreement and she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  “I won’t keep you,” he said. “I just wanted to express my condolences to the families of those poor victims.” He chuckled his low laugh and then hung up.

  Shaking her head, Sayer shifted her focus back to the case and looked through the crime scene photos as they came in from the field. Though she didn’t really want to, she also listened to the heartbreaking recording of Officer Graham being shot. The sound of him dying and the indecipherable singsong chant on the tape made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  But they had no ballistics on the bullet that killed the officer, no autopsy reports, no ID on the girl. She loathed this moment in every investigation when she didn’t have actionable information, but still felt the burning need to be doing something.

  Her phone buzzed with an incoming photo and Sayer expected it to be additional crime scene photos so she was momentarily jolted at the sight of her family gathered around Tino’s massive dinner table. Eighteen-year-old Adi’s mussed pink hair fell over her face, covering half of her beaming smile. Sayer’s adopted daughter had just found out a few weeks before that she was accepted early admission to Stanford and she hadn’t stopped smiling since. She was heading to California the next morning to check out the campus.

  Sayer’s nana smiled in her calm, knowing way, her arm wrapped protectively over Adi’s shoulder. Her small gold and pearl earrings matched the simple necklace that fell over her black cashmere sweater. Despite being in her seventies, Nana always looked like she’d just stepped out of a Chanel ad.

  Tino’s bristly mustache and wire glasses made her neighbor look more like an Argentinian philosopher than a chef and former army interrogator. He wore a similarly beaming smile, one hand resting on Vesper’s head. The silvery, three-legged dog’s goofy canine smile peeked just above the edge of the table. They had both officially become a K9 therapy team and Sayer would swear that Vesper was as thrilled as his humans.

  Adi’s accompanying text said, Went ahead with our celebration meal without you. Missed you! Hope to see you before I head to Stanford tomorrow. xoxo

  A faint smile danced across Sayer’s lips before she forced herself to think about the dead girl on the cold stone.

  She was relieved when Ezra texted, The ME pulled a print off Jane Doe’s cheek! I’m in the conference room running it now.

  Sayer hurried toward the small command center hoping for a quick break in the case.

  FBI COMMAND CENTER, QUANTICO, VA

  Sayer knew as soon as she entered the small command center that it wasn’t good news.

  “No match in AFIS.” Ezra frowned. The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allowed him to search tens of millions of prints across the nation. “I’ve got a program crawling all other publicly accessible databases, but that’ll take an hour or two.”

  “Damn, a quick match would’ve been nice,” Sayer said, sitting at the head of the large conference table. “We sure it’s the killer’s print?”

  “Well, it was on her cheek that was otherwise perfectly clean. Like so clean he must’ve wiped her down.”

  Sayer grunted understanding and spent the next few minutes looking through her painfully thin stack of notes.

  Frowning again, Ezra went back to clacking away at his computer.

  People began to filter in for the task force meeting and, at 1:00 A.M., Sayer stood up at the head of the room to quiet the gathered agents. Ezra, three FBI analysts, four field agents, and two DCPD officers were all clearly ready to start.

  Sayer nodded to Ezra to put up the first photo. She’d worked with him long enough to know that she could just follow his lead.

  The low buzz of chatter died down at the sight of the dead D.C. police officer. Being shot at random was the worst fear of any law enforcement officer and the sight of his body sent an involuntary shudder through everyone there.

  “Okay, so we’ve got a double murder. At 9:26 P.M., Officer Frank Graham came upon what he believed was someone painting graffiti on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences. He was actually on the radio with the dispatcher when he confronted the killer and was shot without warning. There’s nothing to indicate he was specifically targeted. The dispatcher he was on the phone with reported hearing a ‘chanting song’ being sung right after he was shot. We’ve got a recording of the murder. Ezra?”

  The crackle of a recording began to play over the loudspeaker.

  It was impossible not to hear the flirting tone of the banter between the officer and the dispatcher. The crack of the gunshot on the tape sounded almost like a comedic pop, but the ragged howl of pain from Officer Graham made everyone in the room pale.

  The unintelligible singsong chant at the end sent another shudder along Sayer’s spine.

  When the tape ended with a harsh click, Sayer gave everyone a moment to recover.

  “Does anyone recognize the song at the end?” she asked.

  No one responded so she continued, “All right, I don’t recognize it, either. Ezra?”

  “I’ve sent a copy of the tape to the language department and the audio team to see if they can pick up any sounds we missed.”

  With a nod of approval, Sayer gestured for him to click on the next image.

  A close-up photo of the dead girl came on-screen. In the flash of the camera, the smear of blood across her lips looked unnaturally red.

  “The second victim was this unidentified young woman,” Sayer said. “She was found dead at the Einstein Memorial. What do we know so far?”

  Ezra held up a piece of paper. “‘I’ve got the initial notes from the medical examiner. She was approximately seventeen years old. She was a well nourished and healthy young woman with a lifetime of access to excellent dental and medical care. She did have minor abrasions on her wrists suggesting that she was briefly bound.”

  “Can they tell how long?”

  “Not really,” Ezra said. “They sent the skin scraped from under her nails to DNA but got no match in CODIS. I’m working my way through other DNA databases now.” Even though the Combined DNA Index System was the largest DNA database in the world, it didn’t include hundreds of smaller private or restricted access databases.

  “She got a piece of him?” she asked.

  “Yeah, looks like it.” Ezra looked back down at the page, tension creasing the lines around his eyes.

  “Well done,” Sayer said softly to the girl in the photo. She wished she could reach into the image to touch the girl’s papery hand.

  “They also took samples from the blood on her lips and the writing that was also in blood. They’re all a match to the same person, a single male donor. We’ll work up a profile based on the DNA, but you know how unreliable that can be,” Ezra said.

  “So, right now, it’s looking like we’ve got a solo unsub. Interesting that he so willingly left his blood
at the scene. Maybe he knows he’s not in the system. What about cause of death?” Sayer asked.

  Ezra read off the single-page report in his hand. “She died around seven this evening due to drowning.”

  Sayer felt a jolt of shock. “Drowning?” she managed to say. Even though Jake’s original autopsy report said that he was shot, she eventually discovered that he had actually drowned, a relatively unusual cause of death. Ignoring the bile creeping up the back of her throat, she forced herself to focus on what Ezra was saying.

  “Yes, she drowned in fresh water. They found some minor bruises on the back of her neck, suggesting that someone simply held her head underwater.” Ezra shuffled the papers, face drawn. “Otherwise, nothing else was disturbed. There are no signs of sexual assault. That’s about it. They’re about to open her up so they’ll report in if they find anything of interest.”

  “Okay.” Sayer gestured for Ezra to continue.

  The next photo zoomed out enough to show the axe in the girl’s hand as well as the circle of crouching baboons. Murmurs spread around the room at the strange sight.

  “As you can see, her body was carefully displayed at the center of this very ritualized display including a circle of nine baboon figurines. An axe was placed in her hand and ‘as above, so below’ written in what appears to be the unsub’s blood on the bench behind her. The whole scene was staged at the Einstein Memorial. What do we know about the location? There’s no standing water at the scene so he clearly killed her elsewhere. Why bring her body there? Ezra, can you give us a quick background on the memorial?”

  He brought up a stock photo of the Einstein statue. “The Einstein Memorial was unveiled on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences April 22, 1979.”

  Ezra clicked on the next image. It was a photo of the girl from directly above showing the star map surrounding her body. The effect was startling. It looked as though she was floating against a greenish sky, stars sparkling around her like a glittering cosmos.